We know surprisingly little about the role of women at childbirth in antiquity.
Literary sources beyond the medical treatises are scarce, and the same applies to iconographical material. Pregnancy or childbirth is rarely depicted,[282] and pregnant or women giving birth appear not to stand metonym- ically for reproduction or fecundity.
Natalie Kampen has explored the few Roman artistic representations of reproduction and motherhood, and she concludes that there is no explicit iconography of pregnancy. This coincides with a remarkable lack of literary discussion (medical texts not included) of how pregnant women look and about their moods and states of mind. However, representation is not reality, and Kampen suggests that Roman art and writing refused a unified story about reproduction and motherhood. i would like to add that the unified story which was accepted concerned the making of fathers.in a patriarchal social universe, continuity and connection are defined through symbolic generative relations between men. The male ability of genesis provides the right of legitimate affiliation. The dilemma is that in the reality of human life as different from myth where parturition well might be within the powers of the supreme male deity, male incorporation can only occur by way of women. The irony is that whereas motherhood manifests itself bodily and unmistakably, fatherhood is not visible and evident in the same compelling manner; it is in fact fragile and vulnerable. Before the discovery of DNA and the technology of verification now available, it was difficult, even impossible, to observe and prove paternity beyond dispute. The obvious question might seem to be why indeed a woman required a man to produce children.[283] It was evident that a man needed a woman’s capability of nurturing a fetus until it was ready to leave the womb. It was, however, not equally evident why she needed him - but for the evidence from actual experience that neither could reproduce without the other.
Parthenogenesis was indeed miraculous, and the dream of a world where women were superfluous was a utopian notion.[284] [285]The fragility and vulnerability of fatherhood in the patrilineal culture of the ancient Greco-Roman society made it all the more necessary to secure paternity discursively and ritually. Paternity was therefore not as much discovered as it was created or symbolically constructed. Bonds of belonging between father and child had to be established in ways that corresponded to and recognized paternal power, and a twofold strategy resolved the dilemma. On the one hand one would constantly seek to undercommunicate or in various ways disown the role of woman in procreation. On the other, paternity and the father’s potestas were reinforced by cosmological myths of origin, by medical (scientific) discourses, and by postnatal rites. Thus attitudes and values were voiced that also permeated the understanding of the conditions and processes as each human being was conceived, born, and incorporated into structures of viability.
The father was ideally and ritually cast as the giver of life. In a famous strophe by Aeschylus, Apollo, in the presence of the presiding Athena, speaks in defence of Orestes:
The mother of what is called her child is not its parent but only the nurse of the swelling new-sown seed. The man who mounts and impregnates, brings it into the world, whereas she, as a stranger for a stranger, does but keep the sprout alive unless god hurts its root. And I will offer you a sure proof of what I say: fatherhood there may be, when mother there is none. Here at hand is a witness, the child of Olympian Zeus - and not so much as nursed in the darkness of the womb, but such a scion as no goddess could bring forth.
Thus in myth divine fathers might give birth: Athena emerged fully equipped from Zeus’s head and Dionysus, the twice-born, from his thigh. However, even if the two were born from a male parent alone, the myth still assumed that a female agent initially was needed. Zeus swallowed Metis so that he could bear Athena from his head, and in order to bear Dionysus he removed the embryo from Semele and implanted it into his thigh.[286] When females attempted to be equally self-sufficient and generate on their own, the result was somehow defect or monstrous. An example is the goddess Hera who in retaliation of Zeus’s “do-it-yourself procreation” attempted at single-handed generation, the result being the monstrous serpent Typhoeus - a story not dissimilar of the Sethian tradition about Sophia who in an attempt at conceiving by herself gave birth to Yaldabaoth.
Hence, when a male was portrayed as giving birth, he is not necessarily bent towards a feminine quality or presented in androgynous terms; he might equally well express male completion and omnipotence having consumed or usurped the female.
A.